by Eric Reed
the city from a backwater administrative seat and sleepy winter resort into an
important commercial and industrial center.132 Elf- Aquitaine’s colonization
of the Southwest in the 1950s and 1960s spurred the development of chemical
and energy fi rms that employed 20 percent of Pau’s industrial workforce.133
Hosting the Tour became, in some ways, more of a burden than a benefi t
for Pau’s hotels and restaurants. By the 1970s, many of the downtown hotels
that lodged the Tour caravan each year had joined national hotel chains. Al-
though lodging a cycling team during the race’s stay bestowed a measure of
local recognition, many of Pau’s hotels relied on their national chains to refer customers to them and generate publicity outside the region.134 More signifi cantly, local hotels and restaurants came to depend on business travelers
rather than on tourists. Hosting the Tour’s caravan became somewhat of an
inconvenience. Tour planners reserved entire hotels up to a year in advance
but only for a single night, which often disrupted the travel plans of business people visiting the town. In hotels that lodged cycling teams, Tour organizers
demanded that owners close their restaurants and other facilities to outside
customers to allow riders to recuperate and dine in privacy. Frequently, the
Tour’s entourage requested special security arrangements in their hotels, and
hotel restaurants had to accommodate the special dietary needs and strange
dining schedules of the cyclists, which often required hiring additional hotel
staff during the race’s stay.135 Because of these factors, the Tour’s arrival often disrupted the normal operations of Pau’s hotels and restaurants and resulted
in lost revenues and business.136
t h e t o u r i n t h e p r o v i n c e s
137
Town offi cials instead used the Tour’s passage to publicize important local
initiatives to the nation. In 1969 and 1970, Pau cooperated with the nearby
town of Mourenx to host the Tour. Beginning in 1956, Elf- Aquitaine had
subsidized the construction of Mourenx as a brand- new, planned, ultra-
modern urban center to house the thousands of workers at the Lacq produc-
tion facilities.137 Pau and Mourenx arranged the Tour’s visits to celebrate the close ties between the two towns — as well as between the two towns and
Elf- Aquitaine — and to acquaint the rest of France with Mourenx. The 1969
Mourenx fi nish became one of the Tour’s legendary stages: Eddy Merckx’s as-
tounding victory sealed the fi rst of his fi ve Tour victories and earned Merckx the nickname “Cannibal” in recognition of the way he devoured his opponents on the road to Mourenx. Pau employed the Tour’s media coverage on
other occasions, as well, such as to announce the grand openings of the Palais
des Sports athletic complex in 1991, the Zénith concert hall in 1992, and the
Palais des Congrès conference facility in 1999.
In the postwar era, as its economy transformed, Pau enjoyed a prolonged
“love affair” with the Tour that grew beyond commercialism and touristic
promotion. The race’s prominent place in Pau’s summer sporting calendar
exemplifi ed how local popular culture evolved. The Palois abandoned the
English- inspired sporting culture that had been a central component of the
local identity. A comparison of a visitor’s guidebook produced by Pau’s tour-
ism offi ce in 1932 to promotional materials and press releases disseminated in recent years reveals how the local populace embraced a new sporting culture
after the Second World War in which modern, popular sports like cycling,
soccer, basketball, and rugby fi gured highly. In its 1932 guidebook, Pau’s tourism offi ce devoted two of the twelve chapters to sport. The guidebook fea-
tured lengthy descriptions of Pau’s English- inspired, amateur sporting scene,
which was dominated by the wealthy elite that wintered in Pau. A discussion
of the town’s famous fox hunts and hunting- dog kennels spanned two pages,
and the guide featured several pages of photographs depicting the hunts and
the hunting grounds. The guide devoted two pages to winter horse- jumping
competitions in Pau and two pages to the town’s Wright Brothers – founded
fl ying school. It also included descriptions of Pau’s annual dog show, the nu-
merous golf courses in the area, local tennis courts, and polo competitions
organized by the “foreign colony.”138
By the 1990s, the focus of Pau’s sporting culture had shifted to predomi-
nantly popular, professional sports. Locally produced promotional materials
trumpeted the victories of Pau’s professional teams such as the Élan Béarnais,
a four- time champion of the French basketball league since the 1970s; the Sec-
tion Paloise, a three- time champion of the French professional rugby league;
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c h a p t e r f i v e
and the Football Club de Pau, which climbed to the French fi rst- division soc-
cer league in 1995. By 2014, the city’s offi cial Internet site included no mention of fox hunting, fl ying schools, or polo. The site listed the Tour de France in fi rst place, however, just before the Grand Prix automobile race, as part of
Pau’s local sporting heritage and declared that the Béarnais capital is “on the podium” of towns that have welcomed the Tour the most frequently.139
*
The history of the Tour in its host towns sheds light on how Pau and Brest
engaged the broader world and participated in the construction of France’s
evolving national culture. Eugen Weber formulated a classic model of how
France’s contemporary national culture emerged during the Third Republic.
In Weber’s analysis, the centralized state played the key role in transforming
France’s traditional, regional cultures and in disseminating modern, “Pari-
sian” culture to the provinces by building schools, railroads, a modern army,
and a politically active and republican- minded electorate.140
Although historians correctly stress the crucial function of Paris and the
centralized state as disseminators of common cultural practices and tradi-
tions, other forces also shaped France’s popular culture. The case studies of
Pau and Brest illustrate how provincial communities contextualized a na-
tional cultural institution in different ways and used it for their own ends.
In Brest, a town ravaged by war, the Tour developed into a novel cultural
conduit and mode of commercial communication. Younger generations of
provincial Breton leaders used the race’s ever- growing media coverage to
promote their integration into the national, European, and global economies
in new ways. Pau valued the Tour as a tool to restore its position in the evolving global tourism industry. As Pau developed a more diversifi ed economy,
the original commercial purpose of the Tour receded to the background. The
Palois paid the Tour to visit each year because the community cherished the
event as part of its annual summer festival calendar.
The Tour should be understood as a national and global phenomenon
that was largely experienced — and constructed — on a local level. The con-
tinuous and complex negotiations between the Parisian organizers and the
stage towns, which played themselves out in the newspapers, chambers of
commerce, and city halls of twenty different French cities each year,
heavily
infl uenced the Tour’s development. The construction of the Tour’s commer-
cial and cultural traditions was a continuous but rather uneven process that
was strongly infl uenced by the changing interests of local communities and
that was intimately tied to their evolving identities and economies.
6
The Tour’s Globalizing Agenda in the Television Age
Greg LeMond was the fi rst non- European to win the Tour de France. French
television captured the moment in 1986 when the young, dirty- blond Ne-
vadan mounted the podium on the Champs- Élysées. Paris mayor Jacques
Chirac awkwardly squeezed LeMond’s hand, passed him a yellow jersey, and
helped the new champion pull the shirt over his torso. To LeMond’s right,
second- place fi nisher and teammate Bernard Hinault, the French fi ve- time
winner of the Tour, grinned sheepishly, shuffl ed from foot to foot, stood
with hands on hips staring at the ground, and chatted distractedly with by-
standers as the American national anthem played over the loudspeaker. The
French television announcer, Robert Chapatte, recognized that the Ameri-
can’s victory was an “historic moment” that heralded a potential passing
of the torch to a new, foreign generation. The announcers invited a former
LeMond- Hinault teammate, Frenchman Marc Madiot, to comment during
the ceremony. Madiot concluded that although LeMond prevailed, the 1986
Tour should have had “two victors” because Hinault had “done at least as
much as Greg to win it.” “We have to respect the American, I think,” con-
ceded Chapatte.1 The reactions to LeMond’s crowning moment captured the
ambivalence with which the French faced professional road cycling’s ongo-
ing globalization and the prospect of declining French fortunes in the Tour.
Following Hinault’s fi nal yellow jersey in 1985, the French endured decades
during which no French rider won the Tour. The American rider’s victory
confi rmed, however, that France’s national bicycle race remained in the van-
guard of the sport’s globalization.
Globalization in the postwar era instigated a new kind of interconnect-
edness, especially in the Western world. The rise of novel regimes of mass
consumption and leisure, growing economic interdependence, ever- more-
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c h a p t e r s i x
complex, voluminous, and intertwined networks of economic and cultural
interaction, and the maturation of new technologies such as airline travel,
telecommunications, and the Internet sparked this sea change. These trends
initiated quantitative and qualitative changes in the way that people inter-
acted across distances.2
International contact and interaction became more deeply embedded
in everyday life in the electronic age. Global mass tourism and increasing
migration in the postwar era created new human diasporas and enhanced
awareness of cultural and social practices among disparate societies. At the
same time, electronic mass media and communications facilitated instant
conversation among people separated by national and natural boundaries
and allowed them to consume media content simultaneously, in real time.
Furthermore, the mass consumer and leisure revolutions that characterized
France’s “Thirty Glorious Years” occurred around the world, albeit at differ-
ent times and paces in different regions, with the result that global networks
of business, marketing, production, and consumption broadened and deep-
ened. Together, these phenomena led to ever- growing exchanges of ideas,
language, taste, practices, and culture that transpired beyond the contexts of
locality, nation, or region.
Sport held a signifi cant place in the emerging global cultural economy
after the Second World War. Communication technologies like television
and the Internet transformed well- established international sporting events
like the World Cup soccer tournament and the Olympic Games into inti-
mate shared experiences for hundreds of millions of spectators around the
planet.3 Phenomena such as South Koreans in Philadelphia watching the 1988
Seoul Olympics via satellite feed epitomize the growing disjuncture between
place and experience brought about by globalization, as well as the signifi cant place of sport in fostering the novel networks of identity and community
that have become possible in the digital age.4 Moreover, sports, like other
industries, took on global proportions in the postwar era. The development
of worldwide broadcasting engendered new transnational business structures
and relationships of commercial interest among athletics, industry, and the
media that linked professional sport throughout the world. Increasingly fl uid
international exchanges of athletes accompanied such commercial linkages,
especially in global sports like soccer, baseball, and cycling.5
The Tour’s evolution as a business and sporting event mirrored these
trends, and the event’s organizers pursued an agenda that took advantage
of them. As the television economy of professional sports matured, Tour or-
ganizers crafted the race into a made- for- television spectacle that showered
publicity on its biggest corporate sponsors, continually expanded the event’s
t h e t o u r ’ s g l o b a l i z i n g a g e n d a
141
viewership, and transformed the Tour into a worldwide television event. As
these transitions occurred, some of the characteristics that had differentiated the business of French sport from those of other Western nations disappeared.
The context of the nation did not disappear, however, as the Tour became
a global phenomenon.6 The Tour’s particularly French character, qualities,
structures, and cultural symbolism were mimicked, reproduced, and dis-
seminated outside France. The race’s masters exerted a powerful infl uence on
the rules, ethics, competitive structure, commercialization, and scheduling
of professional road cycling, which by the 1980s had become a global profes-
sional sport with numerous Tour- inspired races around the world to fi ll the
competition calendar. During this time, too, Tour organizers courted partici-
pants and sponsors from regions outside the heart of European professional
cycling, including the United States, Central and South America, Eastern Eu-
rope, and Australia. Paradoxically, this infl ux of new blood brought an end to the overwhelming French predominance of the Tour and its commerce but at
the same time helped to promote the association of Frenchness with profes-
sional cycling outside Europe.
1. The Persistent Power of the Press
Until the late twentieth century, the printed press remained the medium in
which most spectators outside France followed the Tour. The medium con-
tinued to play a powerful role in establishing and disseminating the event’s
quintessentially French image and character around the world. The fact that
extensive television coverage of the race did not exist, except in a handful
of European markets, until the late 1980s helps to explain this trend. Tour
press coverage outside France expanded signifi cantly and developed greater
nuance and complexity after the Second World War. A
n examination of
English- language press in the United States and Britain reveals that mass
print media conveyed deep knowledge of the Tour to readers and fans on
two continents. In other words, in their daily newspapers and magazines,
foreign readers followed race narratives, but also learned about the event’s
rituals, stars, history, controversies, commercial structure, and central place in French popular culture. Thus, the press played a central role in developing
abroad a fairly refi ned, profound understanding of the event and its mean-
ing to the French. This deep knowledge of the Tour abroad promoted the
association of the race, as well as its values, meanings and rituals, with all of professional cycling. Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did television and the
Internet rival newspapers as the global Tour’s primary media outlet.
In the postwar era, foreign press coverage of the Tour resembled more
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c h a p t e r s i x
and more that found in French newspapers. Before the Second World War,
newspapers outside professional cycling’s core countries in Western Europe
wrote copy using wired or mailed press releases and fi rsthand accounts of-
fered by shipbound travelers months after the fact. Frequently, wired or
mailed press releases were written by Paris- based general correspondents
who were not sports reporters, did not witness the race in person, and had
little expert knowledge of the Tour. After the war, hundreds of foreign jour-
nalists joined the Tour caravan and followed the race in person for extended
periods of time.7 Often, they rode in the same vehicles, slept in the same
hotels, ate in the same restaurants, and took in the same French radio and
television coverage of the event as their French counterparts. Just as the Tour and other French road races were the proving grounds on which the cream
of world professional cycling honed its skills and mettle, the media caravan of the Tour became an academy in which foreign journalists gained a profound
understanding of the event and its French journalistic conventions, which
they then conveyed to their readership at home.8
Journalists offered their English- language readers extensive commentar-
ies on the complex, impenetrable tactics and strategies of cycling, a sport that, to the uninitiated, appears to have little of either. Such commentaries developed in foreign readers a basic understanding of an inherently arcane sport.